Interested in how YWS looked back in the day? There's a grouping of screenshots below. The earliest is from September 2005, so it unfortunately doesn't show what YWS looked like before it went portal-esque.

So anyhow, the first one is of YWS as it looked from early December 2004 to mid-January 2005. The noteboard theme used then was the first time YWS looked different from your standard phpBB2 forum set-up. This was before YWS went portal-esque and was just a forum.

The second screenshot is of YWS on September 21, 2005, and you can tell a lot has changed. There's the link to the Album we used to have, and there's three complete columns on the front page. Yet, you can still see the "Who's in the Chatroom" section, although that was for a very different chat.

The second I've included is from May 8, 2006, which was just two weeks before the site went down (went down for two months on May 22, 2006). At the time, I asserted that the downage wouldn't be forever, but very few believed me

Anyhow, you can see that we used to have featured story & poem picked by Sam and Snoink respectively. Nowadays, featured works is done quite differently, but it didn't return until 2008. The other difference between it and the 2005 one is that the My YWS page was added, the YWS Arcade is there (we used to have dozens of flash games for you to spend points on), and the big 101 sites logo.

Then we move onto February 24, 2007. This is what YWS looked like after it returned from the 2006 hiatus. The background back then was all white, the board navigation menu looked cleaner, and you have the full header (the header looked different if you were logged in).

Then we move on to August 31, 2007 and to April 11, 2008. Both are substantially similar, and the site changed little until the new YWS arrived in August 2009. Since the site came back, it's gone through more evolution until you get what we have today!

Anyhow, not sure how many people will find this interesting, but it shows how YWS has evolved over the years. I doubt it'll evolve much more though. Then again, I keep saying that until it changes by a ton...

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. " "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."~Douglas Adams

Wow, that's awesome! We should make a documentary or something: "YWS Through the Ages..."

"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function...We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." ~C.S. Lewis

Hehehe. I remember all of those. I think I missed the noteboard theme though. I dunno. Well, all in all I don't think it's changed that much. You always keep the left and right navbars. You added the top one though with drop down menus. And you've always kept that sort of grey/blue rounded theme. Shows that it's a successful style. Well done, Nate.

Updated this thread to include screenshots of the New YWS, and edited the first post as well.

It's interesting to me to see just how much the site has changed over the years. I was surprised even by how much it's changed in just the last year and a half, much less the past six. We've gone through so much change on this site, from having dynamic avatars to a YWS Arcade room to the new profile system that it's kind of incredible. Not everything lasted (the dynamic avatars didn't even last a month), but it's all helped form the site you see (and hopefully love!) today.